I love tech­nol­ogy and its many promises but some­times I won­der: Is it really a boon to my work or is some­thing closer to the bane of my existence?

I'm an early adopter. (Pre­dictably, I can hardly wait to see what won­ders Apple's rumored mul­ti­me­dia tablet will offer.) Among my per­sonal hard­ware relics I count the case from my first 128K Mac­in­tosh that has the sig­na­tures of all the Apple engi­neers etched inside it. My col­lec­tion includes early flip phones, mul­ti­ple smart­phones and PDAs, ter­rific lap­tops from IBM, DELL and Apple, sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of wire­less routers, a range of flash mem­ory sticks (one with more mem­ory than the early space shut­tles had onboard), and, of course, three kinds of iPods and two gen­er­a­tions of iPhones. My Kin­dle has saved my back; no longer do I carry arm­loads of books when I travel. If I could just fig­ure out how to upload a Trainer's Man­ual, I'd really be set.

I revel in all the things I can now do that I didn't used to be able to do as a result of hard­ware and soft­ware inno­va­tions. For exam­ple, once upon a time in a tiny lit­tle win­dow­less room I sat next to a wiz­ard who sliced and spliced audio tape with awe­some pre­ci­sion. At the time it seemed that it hap­pened zip, zip, et voila! The recorded per­son could be heard say­ing her line exactly as writ­ten — no extra breathe noises or stum­bles. Remark­able! Now, of course, audio edit­ing is done dig­i­tally and my friendly sound engi­neer, Joel, has retired his razor blade and splic­ing tape. The fact that I can use a prod­uct like Gold­Wave or Audac­ity and do it myself now is just plain thrilling.

But here's my ques­tion: Is tech­nol­ogy really a boon to the instruc­tional designer or trainer? I mean, does any­one else hear a loud, time-sucking noise when it comes to tech­nol­ogy? For exam­ple, has any­one out there bought or installed new hard­ware or down­loaded soft­ware only to find that the com­puter now doesn't play well with the rest of the net­work or the appli­ca­tion needs a plug-in to work but, oops, the plug-in crashes the sys­tem? A part of me thinks it's fun to solve the rid­dles. Another more prac­ti­cal part of me screams "Time's a wast­ing!! Why doesn't this all work together?"

It's not only new hard­ware and soft­ware that eats time. There's a con­stant stream of new con­tent to explore; it's easy to get lost in it all. For exam­ple, I fol­low Tom Kuhlmann's blog on rapid eLearn­ing. It's jam packed with use­ful infor­ma­tion and prac­ti­cal tuto­ri­als. Here's the prob­lem, his blog often offers addi­tional links related to the topic. So what do I do? I fol­low those links and those links beget links and those links beget even more links. The next thing I know it's hours later and I still haven't fin­ished what I started work­ing on. Instead I may have two or three new resources and some prac­ti­cal but untried tech­niques and lots of inspiration.

Clearly there are lots of tech­no­log­i­cal things that intrigue me. Here are a few that I think have the poten­tial to enhance learning:

• Col­lab­o­ra­tive tools like Google wave groups, twit­ter lists, and class blogs
• Rapid eLearn­ing appli­ca­tions that allow excit­ing just-in-time development
• Game-based learn­ing tech­nol­ogy that engages par­tic­i­pants and makes learn­ing fun.

Tech­nol­ogy — Boon or Bane? I can't decide. What do you think?